Nom de guerre

That symbol on the green chest patch is a Wolfsangel, as used by the 2nd SS Panzer Division, so I suspect he knew what he was doing when he told them that his surname was "Friekorps".

The Importance of Procopius

The historical King Arthur seems to have been a petty British King, a commander of allied cavalry, whom the Romans left to his fate when their regular infantry were withdrawn from the garrison towns of Britain at the beginning of the fifth century. If a Procopius had been his chronicler, the ogres and fairy ships and magicians and questing beasts would not have figured in the story except perhaps as a digressive account of contemporary British legend. Instead we should have a lucid chapter or two of late Roman military history – Arthur's gallant attempt to preserve a remanant of Christian civilization in the West country against the pressure of heathen invasion. And Arthur's horse would have been a big-boned cavalry charger, not a fairy steed flying him wildly off towards the Christian millennium.

- Robert Graves, Foreword to Count Belisarius (1938)

Films I Saw in 2021

 Now that I've started using Letterboxd I can pull up neat statistics about what I saw this year. Here's a list of what I saw:

and here's a world map of where they're from (Hong Kong not visible at this scale):

Huemac

From Camilla Townsend's Fifth Sun: A new history of the Aztecs (2019).

Meditations

 Extract from Sean T. Collins' Pain Don't Hurt: Meditations on Road House (2020).

Meetings

Heavy Overhead

"Heavy Overhead" by Jen Orpin.

The British Way of Life

...I swallow my dreams like my beer...

The British Way of Life - The Chords (1980)

 

The Archaeology of Dealey Plaza (2)

Photograph by Michael Parks.

A bit of industrial stratigraphy. Some theories claim that the fatal shot fired at Kennedy came from the storm drain on Elm Street, at the foot of the grassy knoll, hence the potential importance of the differing street levels between 1963 and the present day in terms of determining whether or not such a shot would even have been possible. 

Given that the only exits from the drain are a manhole up to street level and pipes that are 12" and 15" in diameter, it is perhaps an unlikely location for someone who would be looking to get away quickly. 

Closing Speech

It's not that it's not difficult to escape death, gentlemen, but it's much harder to escape wickedness, since it runs faster than death. And now, because I am a slow old man, I am being overtaken by the slower of the two, and my accusers, because they are clever and keen, by the swifter, by evil. And I am going away now, having been condemned to death by you, while they have been condemned by the truth to depravity and injustice. And both I and they will keep to our punishment. Perhaps this is how it had to be, and I suppose it's appropriate.

Next, I want to foretell the future to you my condemners, since I am now at the moment when men especially prophesy, whenever they are about to die. I declare that retribution will come to you swiftly after my death, you men who have killed me, and more troublesome, by Zeus, than the retribution you took when you sentenced me to die. You have done this just now by trying to avoid giving an account of your life, but I think the complete opposition will happen: you will have more prosecutors—whom I was holding back until now, though you did not notice—and as they are younger they will be more troublesome, and you will be more enraged. If you think that killing people will prevent anyone from rebuking you for not living properly, you are not thinking straight, since this escape is scarcely possible nor noble, whereas escape from the other is noblest and easiest: not by cutting down others but equipping oneself so that one can be as good as possible. With this prophecy to you who sentence me, I depart.

From Socrates' speech to the court following his death sentence in 399 BC, at least according to Plato's Apology. This translation is by Cathal Woods and Ryan Pack.

The Central Problem of All Interpretation

- Mary Douglas, "The Social Control of Cognition: Some Factors in Joke Perception" (1968)

Out of Time

I stopped laughing, crying, eating, sleeping…I just stopped. I was like a ghost, haunting my own life, going through the motions, but living even less than I had before. I became hyper-obsessed with the past—back when I was still happy and unperturbed by these thoughts and still had time left; the past also became a concept I loathed because it housed all of the mistakes that led me here, to this misery in which the second half of your 30s can somehow feel like The End, like it’s already too late to start over. I no longer felt like the central character in my life story, like the Hero; instead, I felt like the Heavy who’d destroyed any chance of true usefulness in my life.

- Travis Woods, Still Here: A Journey Through The Funky Fanfare of Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (2019) 

Being a Quentin Tarantino film, Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood, which I first saw a year ago on the day of its UK release, was divisive. It was certainly my film of 2019 and in my view Tarantino's best film this century. Woods' extremely personal long read on the film mirrors a lot of my own thoughts on it and certainly explains why, as with him, it mattered so much to me.

Some Mistakes You Never Forgive Yourself For

    'A long time ago,' the driver said. 'He made a mistake a long time ago.'
    'He made two mistakes,' Cogan said. 'The second mistake was making the first mistake, like it always is.'

 - George V. Higgins, Cogan's Trade (1974)

Lost in Youtube

You are scrolling through Youtube when a video catches your eye. You open it. In the video, a woman reads out a text largely derived from a Wikipedia article you wrote five years ago, about an unsolved murder in which the victim's body was dismembered and left in suitcases. She whispers her way through the text because she is doing this as an ASMR.

She pauses a couple of times to apologise that this ASMR is so "deathy".

Pimlico

Down by the river, where I went to get a breather, I stood beside the big new high blocks of glass-built flats, like an X-ray of a stack of buildings with their skins peeled off, and watched the traffic floating down the Thames below them, very slow and sure (chug, chug) and oily, underneath the electric railway bridge (rattle, rattle), and past the power station like a super-cinema with funnels stuck on it. Peace, perfect peace, though very murky, I decided. Hoot, hoot to you, big barge, bon, bon voyage. There was a merry scream, and I turned about and watched the juveniles, teenagers in bud as you might call them, wearing their little jeans and jumpers, playing in their kiddipark of Disneyland items erected by the borough council to help them straighten out their thwarted egos. When crash! Someone thumped me very painfully on the shoulder blades.

- Colin MacInnes, Absolute Beginners (1959)

It isn't directly mentioned anywhere, but those in the know will recognise a description of the Churchill Gardens estate in Pimlico, where my dad grew up. The playground was still there in the 1980s (maybe it's still there?) and dad used to take me and my sister to it when we were down there on visits to our granny. Anyway, this is probably the estate's only literary appearance.

Ten Years

As though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again.

- Raymond Chandler, The High Window (1942)

St. Patrick's Day (2)

It all started in the late 1960s when Brendan Clifford, an unemployed Jesuit-trained gravedigger was whiling away the time in the library of Trinity College Dublin. Tiring of waiting in the long queue of clerics desirous of studying Gaelic erotic poetry, Clifford asked to see some of the works of the revered fathers of Irish republicanism, which were in no great demand. Having blown off the dust, he was flabbergasted to discover that these saintly heroes, who he had been told were the Irish equivalents of Garibaldi and Mazzini, were a shower of bigoted, racist shitbags, who hated England because it had prevented Ireland from establishing its own empire with its own blacks to chain up and flog. The odd man out among this unsavoury crew was Wolfe Tone, a Protestant whose view of the Vatican tallies closely with that of Ian Paisley.

- John Sullivan, As Soon As This Pub Closes (2004) 

I Can't Forget Your Lonely Face

Earlier this month Andy Gill, the guitarist and - in the band’s own words - “supreme leader” of Gang of Four died. I’ve been trying to write this blog post ever since. I couldn’t really come up with a good ending for it. I’ve also always wanted to be able to write like Greil Marcus, and while this had usually resulted in me writing things that I don’t properly understand, it also puts the pressure on when you’re covering a subject that he did really well. 

I first heard Gang of Four’s music in the early 2000s, put onto them by the post-punk revival that was on at the time (although those first albums by The Liars and The Futureheads are a lot less impressive when you’ve heard the real thing). What worked for me about Gang of Four was something that also worked for me about the writing of William Gibson (particularly the short stories collected in Burning Chrome) which I’d encountered only a few years before.

As a lonely young man, and increasingly as a lonely older man, what Gang of Four's music and William Gibson's short stories gave you was not just something that invoked your loneliness. Like Gibson's prose, the dissonant waves of Andy Gill's guitar, matched by Jon King's vocals, gave you an expressionist representation of how you felt (for this the live version of What We All Want was never bettered). Loneliness took on a texture, a shape. But what was most interesting with Gang of Four was that they provide you with an explanatory theory of why you felt that way.

In their most popular moment of the late 1970s and early 1980s, their preoccupations were with the shock of the transition between the postwar consensus and the new neoliberal economy, a world of unemployed factory workers and supermarket advertising slogans. But 2011's Content took place in the world of capitalism's social media age. Now we're all just each other's content - another unsatisfactory product - so how could anyone really want you?

Occasionally you will meet someone and there will be a shock of recognition. Now you don’t see them anymore, but somehow you can’t forget their lonely face.

The Last Comic

One of the last Peanuts strips drawn by Charles Shulz, January 2nd 2000. Shultz died a month later.

And After All This...

Sign at the exit to the display “The Clash: London Calling” at the Museum of London.